About Dan Wakefield

I had the honor of writing a feature story in Indianapolis Monthly on my dear friend Dick Lugar:

Lugar’s honesty came to the fore again in one of our class’s final activities. It was Shortridge tradition that the graduation dance was put on by 30 senior boys (chosen by the previous year’s seniors) who formed the prestigious “Club Thirty.” It was our job to select the band to play, the site of the dance, set the ticket price, and sell the tickets—in brief, make all the arrangements. At our last meeting, to divide up the spoils—a minor profit divided among us—all were ready to close the meeting and go out for burgers and maybe some under-the-counter beer, when Lugar stood to say that our business wasn’t over. He explained that we needed to report our profits to the I.R.S. and pay whatever tax was required by the government. None of us were trying to do an end run around our responsibility—such an adult duty had simply not occurred to anyone. Lugar made sure it was all carried out according to the letter of the law. My immediate thought was that Dick was making sure that no future muckraking reporter would dig back into his history when he ran for president and find an illegal flaw in his high school past. He was an Eagle Scout, in character as well as achievement, and he never broke a pledge.

Feeling the January blahs? Wake yourself up with a stimulating new production of “The Ballad of Klook and Vinette” put on by the exciting new Brian Fonseca Theater Company. Founder of The Phoenix Theater, Fonseca is to theater in Indianapolis what Vonnegut is to writing – innovative, thoughtful, un-afraid to rock the boat. Fonseca’s first production was “Hooded – Being Black for Dummies” and it lived up to all the adjectives employed in the previous sentence.

I have read the script of the new show – “The Ballad of Klook and Vinette” – it pulses with life, and takes you on a roller coast ride of unexpected dips and highs that will rock you out of your snowbound rut. Klook is a drifter who is tired of drifting, Vinette is on the run but she doesn’t know what’s chasing her. Meeting over carrot juice, they take a chance on love. . .

Take a chance on this life-brimming play, with the extra attraction of music directed and performed by Tim Brickley, an original artist who plays at The Jazz Kitchen and The Chatterbox. The Fonseca Theater Company is staging its first year of provocative productions at Indy Convergence, 2611 W. Michigan.

I was asked by the director of the Middletown (PA) public library to answer questions from his readers about the work of Kurt Vonnegut. Since I have edited and written introductions to three books of Vonnegut’s works, and I had the pleasure of knowing him for more than forty years, it was assumed I would know all the answers. I didn’t. There was one answer I felt good about, though. It was the last question I was asked, by John Grayshaw, director of the library. He asked

“Why do you think Vonnegut’s works are still so popular? What is their staying power?”

This is what came out of my head in response:

Other contemporary writers of his era seem “dated,” like Updike and Roth, who were writing of their time – Vonnegut was writing of past, present and future. Young people are not interested in the suburban life of the 1950s. Vonnegut transcended that.

He gave people hope. He showed he cared for the planet. What other writer of his time did that?

Mailer? Mary McCarthy? Fitzgerald or Hemingway?

He cared about the clumsy, the poor, the downtrodden. He saw that they too had a right to be fed, clothed, and housed against the elements.

He refused to write battle scenes of war, knowing that they made people see slaughter as glamorous. He wrote a war novel in which there are no battles. Saturation bombing is not a “battle.” It is only a devestation.

Next to The Beatitudes the lines he quotes most were from his fellow Hoosier Eugene V. Debs:

“As long as there is a lower class, I am in it; as long as there is a criminal class, I am of it; as long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

He asked why people don’t say things like that anymore. He said them. He dramatized them. He built stories around them. He fed our imagination. He knew were hungry.

"What a wonderful book is Dan Wakefield’s The Story of Your Life. It will help many people to write their own spiritual autobiographies... And I suspect that many readers are going to want to take one of Wakefield’s workshops in writing your spiritual autobiography."